The case had been called Australia’s trial of the century. And though it centered on a claim of defamation, it grappled with a more consequential question: Was the country’s most decorated living soldier a war criminal?

On Thursday, a judge effectively found that the answer was yes.

Four years after the soldier, Ben Roberts-Smith, sued three newspapers that had accused him of killing unarmed Afghan prisoners in cold blood, the judge ruled against him in his defamation case, finding that the newspapers had proved their accounts of his actions were substantially true.

The judgment was a rare victory for the news media in a country whose notoriously harsh defamation laws have been criticized for favoring accusers. And it will reverberate far beyond Mr. Roberts-Smith, as Australia continues to contend with the fallout of its 20-year mission in Afghanistan and the conduct of its elite special forces there.

“Australia has a reputation for being very plaintiff friendly,” said David Rolph, a professor of media law at the University of Sydney. “Here we’ve got a comprehensive victory for the newspapers — that’s not something that you see in every defamation case in Australia.”

He added that the judgment would “bring war crimes into renewed focus,” and may “put pressure on investigating and prosecuting authorities to investigate and consider charges for war crimes.”

In 2020, the country’s military released a damning public account of years of battlefield misconduct among its special forces in Afghanistan, including “credible evidence” that 25 soldiers had been involved in the murders of 39 Afghan civilians.

A government agency was subsequently created to investigate war crimes committed in Afghanistan, and it has started to examine between 40 and 50 allegations of criminal behavior. In March, the authorities made the first-ever arrest of an Australian soldier in a case involving the war crime of murder, accusing him of killing an Afghan man.

Although Mr. Roberts-Smith himself was not on trial in the case decided on Thursday, and it was a civil, not a criminal, case, it was the first time a war crimes allegation had been examined in open court in Australia.

But his public image was shattered in 2018, when The Sydney Morning Herald; The Age, a newspaper in Melbourne; and The Canberra Times published a series of articles accusing Mr. Roberts-Smith of murdering, or being complicit in the murders of, six Afghans.

Mr. Roberts-Smith was not named in the articles, but he later argued in court that he was clearly identifiable.

Lurid and bizarre details emerged: that Mr. Roberts-Smith had hired a private investigator to spy on a girlfriend at an abortion clinic after they had agreed to end her pregnancy; that he had been accused of burying evidence in a child’s lunchbox in his backyard; and that he had poured gasoline on his personal laptop and set fire to it.

The case contained two centerpiece allegations. In 2009, the newspapers said, two Afghan men were discovered hiding in a tunnel at a compound and taken prisoner. Mr. Roberts-Smith, the newspapers reported, killed one of the men, who had a prosthetic leg, and ordered a more junior soldier to kill the other as a form of initiation. Mr. Roberts-Smith then took the prosthetic leg back to Australia, the newspapers said, and encouraged other soldiers to use it as a novelty drinking vessel.

The newspapers also said that, in 2012, Mr. Roberts-Smith kicked an unarmed, handcuffed Afghan farmer off a cliff and that a colleague then shot the man dead as Mr. Roberts-Smith watched.

Mr. Roberts-Smith denied that any Afghans had been found in the tunnel in 2009. In the other case, he said, the man was a Taliban scout, not a farmer, and had been killed lawfully in combat, not after being kicked off a cliff.

The newspapers had to prove it was more likely than not — rather than beyond a reasonable doubt, as in a criminal case — that Mr. Roberts-Smith committed war crimes.

The judge found that the newspapers had successfully proved that their accounts of the two events were true, as well as Mr. Roberts-Smith’s complicity in another murder. The newspapers did not successfully prove his involvement in two other murders.

Nine, the company that owns The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, said in a statement that the verdict was a “vindication” of the journalists involved, and that their articles “will have a lasting impact on the Australian Defense Force and how our soldiers conduct themselves during conflict.”

Arthur Moses, Mr. Roberts-Smith’s lawyer, said that his legal team would consider an appeal.

It was almost 3 a.m. in New York, but Nazdana Hassani refused to fall asleep.

She stared at her phone, closing and refreshing WhatsApp, hoping that her mother’s internet had been restored at her home in Afghanistan.

She tried three more times, but the call would not go through.

The last time Ms. Hassani saw her mother in person was August 2021, days before the Taliban seized control of Kabul.

Ms. Hassani, 24, served in the Afghan National Army’s Female Tactical Platoon, a squad of all women that accompanied U.S. Special Operations troops on missions seeking out high-level Taliban, Al Qaeda and ISIS targets. As the Taliban took over two summers ago, Ms. Hassani faced a decision: live under a repressive government as a woman who worked alongside the U.S. Army, or flee her home country for the United States.

Of the 45 Afghan women who served in Ms. Hassani’s platoon, 39 escaped amid the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. troops nearly two years ago.

Now Ms. Hassani and most of her platoon are among the tens of thousands of Afghans living in the United States as humanitarian parolees, a temporary legal status. This month, the Biden administration announced a plan to allow Afghans to apply for a parole extension so they can continue living and working in the United States after their status expires in August. It is unclear if the extensions, if granted, would be for two years, as they were the first time.

For those who were in the platoon, the goal is to stay in the United States long term and to have their families, who are still in Afghanistan, join them. Ms. Hassani and nearly all of the platoon members have applied for asylum — a protected status for those fearing persecution in their home country — but the system is severely backlogged. Only three of the women so far have been granted asylum, which enables them to obtain a green card and bring their families over.

Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota, has sponsored the Afghan Adjustment Act, a bill that would create a legal pathway for permanent residency for Afghans who worked alongside Americans during the Afghanistan conflict.

“So many of our Afghan allies risked their lives and their loved ones’ safety to protect our service members,” Ms. Klobuchar said.

The legislation stalled in the last Congress amid Republican concerns about the vetting of applicants, but Ms. Klobuchar said she was working with Republicans to build support for another attempt later this year.

Ms. Hassani, who works at a gift shop in a quiet suburb of Westchester County, N.Y., shares an apartment with two Afghan women whom she met at a shelter for evacuees in 2021.

The only piece of art in Ms. Hassani’s room is a painting propped up by the foot of her bed.

“I made this when I first came to the U.S.,” she said. “Some volunteers at the camps gave us paint and canvas.”

Joining the army was Ms. Hassani’s childhood dream. The youngest member of the platoon, she was born just months before the start of America’s two-decade war in Afghanistan.

“I remember my mom telling us, the Americans, they are here for us, they are good people,” Ms. Hassani said.

The idea for Ms. Hassani’s platoon came about a decade into the war, when the U.S. military decided it needed female troops to help patrol rural villages. It was considered culturally insensitive for the male soldiers to search or talk to Afghan women.

Mary Kolars, an Army captain who worked closely with the platoon, said having them on missions was invaluable. “They had information about tribal affiliations, they could look at a village and tell us what doesn’t fit, they helped us search for high-ranking targets.”

Today, most of the platoon members are scattered across the United States working minimum-wage service jobs.

Since arriving, Ms. Hassani clings to memories of her adventures in the army.

“I try to be grateful for my life here,” she said. “But my life and job, it’s all just very different now.”

Last month, Ms. Kolars, Ms. Hassani and nearly all of the platoon members in the United States traveled to Washington, D.C., to lobby Congress to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act.

“Every day hurts, because I know that my family is not safe in Afghanistan,” Ms. Hassani said.

She and other members of the platoon said they underwent extensive background checks to serve alongside the American military. The women also said that they had to obtain written permission from male relatives to join the Afghan Army. Those documents contained information about the women’s families and remained in Afghan government files after Kabul fell.

Many of the women said that since then, relatives have been threatened, tortured or killed by Talibs, according to Ms. Kolars. She and other American soldiers who worked with the platoon said they think the Taliban has used the documents to track down family members.

“It’s just hard, to live life with this constant anxiety about the family that is back home,” said Jawida Afshari, 34, who served in the platoon for nearly a decade and who helped train recruits, including Ms. Hassani.

Both women interviewed for asylum last October — Ms. Afshari was granted asylum, while Ms. Hassani’s application is still pending.

Ms. Afshari, who works at a Chick-fil-A near her Dallas apartment complex, said she often finds herself thinking about life before Kabul fell. She had been weeks away from obtaining a law degree at Kabul University.

“I am so lucky, because the women in Afghanistan, they can’t work at restaurants, they can’t leave the house,” Ms. Afshari said. “But it can be hard to remember how long I worked and studied at home, and how that was all taken away so quickly.”

While she waits for the opportunity to apply for a green card, Ms. Afshari tries to carve out pockets of joy from her life in Dallas. Most of her neighbors are immigrants from Iraq and Mexico. “None of us can speak English, but we find a way to talk,” she said with a laugh.

The day she discovered an Arabic grocery store nearby that stocks halal meats, Ms. Afshari cooked a feast of Afghan shawarma for her neighbors.

Mahnaz Akbari, the commander of the platoon, also does not have asylum. She has used her English language skills to work for a nonprofit in Washington. She said she tries to keep morale high even when the women are exhausted, often through group video calls.

While cooking dinner in her Silver Spring, Md., apartment last week, Ms. Akbari propped up her phone on the kitchen counter, waiting for platoon members on the West Coast to join.

During these calls, the women exchange photos, share Afghan recipes that can be made using American groceries and advise one another on questions about life in the United States. How many credit cards are you supposed to open? Is going to the D.M.V. as bad as people say? Ms. Hassani said those calls have become a lifeline.

In the weeks after her asylum interview, Ms. Hassani was consumed by anxiety, wondering why there had been no update on her case. She kept replaying the interview in her head, wondering if she had somehow made a misstep. Ms. Hassani said Ms. Akbari’s support helped her stay calm.

“Mahnaz takes time to cheer us up,” she said, “so we don’t give up.”

Luke Broadwater contributed reporting.

At least three people were killed and several others injured after clashes broke out along the Iranian-Afghan border on Saturday night, according to Iranian state media and an Afghan official, escalating tensions between the two countries amid a heated dispute over water rights in recent weeks.

At least two Iranian border guards were killed in the fighting, which began around noon on Saturday and ended after six hours along the southwestern border of Afghanistan, according to Iranian state media and Afghan news reports. One soldier with the Taliban administration in Afghanistan was also killed, the Afghan Ministry of Interior said.

Officials from both countries accused the other of initiating the clashes. An official in southeastern Iran said that calm had returned to the border area on Saturday night, according to Iranian state media.

The skirmishes come amid rising political tension between the two countries over the flow of water from the Helmand River in Afghanistan into eastern Iran, a region that has been plagued by drought. The mouth of the river is along the border in southwestern Afghanistan and southeastern Iran, where the clashes took place.

In recent weeks, Iranian officials have accused the Taliban administration of violating a decades-old treaty between the two countries by restricting the flow of water out of Afghanistan, an accusation Taliban officials have denied.

The issue of water has been a flashpoint between Afghanistan and Iran for centuries. The two countries are bound by the Helmand River, the longest river in Afghanistan, which flows from the foothills of the Hindu Kush mountain range and feeds into wetlands along the country’s border with Iran. The river is a critical source of drinking water, as well as agriculture and fishing, in southern Afghanistan and southeastern Iran.

In the 1940s and ’50s, Afghan governments constructed two major dams along the Helmand River, giving Afghanistan the power to cut off the flow of water into Iran and alarming Iranian officials as the country experienced periods of intense drought. Though the two countries signed a treaty on sharing water resources in 1973, it was never ratified, and the flow of water from the river has remained a heated point of contention ever since.

Since the Taliban seized power in August 2021, the Iranian authorities have maintained relations with Afghanistan, and in February, Iran became one of a few foreign governments to accept Taliban-appointed diplomats in their country.

But this month, President Ebrahim Raisi of Iran warned the Taliban administration not to violate the terms of the 1973 water treaty and urged the Afghan government to allow Iranian hydrologists to check the river’s water levels.

“We will not allow the rights of our people to be violated,” Mr. Raisi said.

On Saturday morning, the Taliban administration’s minister of foreign affairs, Amir Khan Muttaqi, met with Iran’s top diplomat in Afghanistan, Hassan Kazemi Qomi, to discuss the water dispute, among other issues, according to Hafiz Zia Ahmad, the deputy spokesman for the Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

After the clashes broke out along the border, the Afghan Ministry of National Defense called for the two countries to reach a negotiated settlement.

“Making excuses for war and negative actions is not in the interest of any of the parties,” the ministry said in a statement.

Safiullah Padshah contributed reporting.